I have yet to see or hear of any healthful benefit to the use of tobacco, so I am a little dismayed by you giving “The Boot” to the Bend Metro Parks and Recreation Board for considering a ban on the use of tobacco in the park facilities of Bend.
ย
Are you going to apply a “retroactive boot” to the Bend-La Pine schools for declaring their district facilities smokeless and chewless back in 1991, a good 14 years before it was required by Oregon statutes?
I believe the SW is missing the point that places where the public chooses to gather should be as healthy as possible. There are enough other establishments for people to gather and smoke or chew.
Peter M. Miller
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2008.
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Smoking in the park isn’t even a big deal. I can’t see Bend smokers blowing smoke in anybody’s face everytime they take a drag in the park. There isn’t a bubble around every park that keeps smoke in.
Caleb Holt
Tobacco is poisonous to all who breathe. It should be banned anywhere people gather. Were you to go a assemblage of people and spray poison into the air out of an aerosol can, you would be promptly arrested.
What the hell is the difference?
Lighting up is like having a tattoo on your forehead that says, “I’m a really stupid self destructive bastard and my goal is to kill you, too.”
To hell with them.
I’m always amazed at how people chose to expend their fifteen seconds of fame. I find it to be a marker of the state of institutionalized ignorance our society has faln into.
One of the chapters in my as-yet to be published book “Cultural Commons of the Pacific Northwest” I detail just how conscientious smokers are to non-smokers – nobody thinks twice if someone lights up a puff of marijuana, but light up tobacco in a public place and even the smokers are all over the offender like flies on an outhouse (any of you fame seekers know what that is?). It may be a Pavlovian response, but smokers across the northwest tend to not even smoke in their own homes.
And most, I dare say if not all, are considerably smarter than you.
Caveat: I learned how to walk in that park over fifty years ago, and if I want to smoke in that park… I will. To hell with you.
Ten Bears: Smoking is like putting one round in a twenty chamber revolver, spinning it and putting it to your head. In my book, that is both stupid and self destructive. However when you practice that little game, aiming that mindless revolver of yours at me, I rightfully resent that.
And no, you won’t smoke around me in that park. I guarantee you that.
As for intellectual capacity, your obvious limits are apparent.
Ten bears assertion that smokers are smarter than non-smokers is a real laugh riot. Apparently, he is under the false impression that depriving the brain of oxygen raises IQ. All one need do is ponder his comments to assess the validity of his premise.